FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY
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All tagged music
“In mid-2020, a sad scatter of discarded Lonely Planet guides appeared on a stoop near my apartment. I took a photo and sent it to a friend with the caption, “You ain’t going nowhere.” To leave one place for another had become a thing no longer done.”
“I write poems, and mostly my work doesn’t weave itself whole. There are no rhymes; no child would ever demand to hear it during snack. If I have anything resembling a signature move, it is to write something and then write an additional part—sometimes this becomes the introduction, sometimes the conclusion—that explains why the other sections don’t hold together.”
I’ve never had an office, apart from the sad, windowless closet I occupied as a grad student. I don’t own a desk. Some days I work at my kitchen table, but more often I sit on my couch or in bed with my computer on my lap. Music, rather than location, is what grounds me as I write.
“By describing how the practice of writing interacts with the act of listening to music, the essays in “Music for Desks” aspire to a similar magic. These pieces will be exploratory in nature—in all senses about process, rather than result.”
What’s so important about the story of early LA rap is not that these guys started out deciding that they would create “Fuck tha Police,” or, for that matter, “Findum, Fuckum, and Flee.” The point is that they worked to create a platform for themselves—for Black youths—to say whatever they wanted to say. That’s their most powerful legacy.
